Photographer Chester Higgins, Jr.

Biography and photo from PBS.com, "BrotherMen". Additional material from the Los Angeles Times.

American, b. 1946.

"As a teenager, coming of age in Alabama, the images of African Americans I saw in the media didn't look like me or the people I knew," says New York Times staff photographer Chester Higgins Jr. "They were very pejorative. They overlooked three issues: decency, dignity and character."

When he got hooked on photography as a student at Tuskegee University in the 1960s, it was probably inevitable that Higgins would take on the challenge of producing a fuller, richer, more accurate portrait of his people – or, as he puts it, "reinvent the visual document." But he never imagined that his mission would consume every spare minute of his time and lead to a study of the African Diaspora that has taken him on travels to 30 countries on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

"If I had seen the enormity of it, I probably wouldn't have continued," he says. "I didn't know that my social life would be gone and that I would use every vacation to travel somewhere different to take more pictures and return to work needing a vacation."

He credits several photographers as his mentors: P.H. Polk, who got him started at Tuskegee; Arthur Rothstein, Farm Security Administration photographer and director of LOOK magazine photography, who hired Higgins to work for the magazine just before its demise in 1971; Gordon Parks, a longtime friend who is also an author, filmmaker and composer; and Cornell Capa, founder of the International Center of Photography.

In 1975, Higgins became a staff photographer for The New York Times. As one of the premiere African American photographers working today, he continues to exhibit in museums throughout the country and abroad.

Mr. Higgins is the recipient of grants from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the International Center of Photography, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. His photographs have appeared in Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Ebony, Essence and Black Enterprise. Mr. Higgins has produced seminal works in the photo-essay form such as the book collections "Black Woman" and "Drums of Life" and most recently, "Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa," and "Elder Grace: The Nobility of Aging."

An exhibit of his recent work, "Landscapes of the Soul," toured nationally (including the Smithsonian) and was shown at The Museum for African Art in New York City in March, 1999. The show, in a review by The New York Times, noted his series of work on Black women as "a masterpiece in form, lighting and style."

Books:

• 1994, Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa, Bantam Books, 1994
• 2000, Elder Grace, Bullfinch/Little Brown and Company
• 2004, Echo of the Spirit, Doubleday